United Airlines Flight En Route From Honolulu To Guam Diverted To Midway

A United Airlines flight en route from Honolulu to Guam diverted to Midway on Saturday. According to United Airlines, the plane, a Boeing 777, experienced mechanical problems. Passengers reported that the plane smelled as if it were burning. The pilot originally intended to return to Honolulu, but instead diverted when the plane began to fill with haze.

Midway is a small, remote atoll with roughly 60 residents and home to a national wildlife refuge, but it served as an important outpost for the United States during World War II as a Naval Air Facility and a public, uncontrolled airfield, Henderson Field, that remains today.

After the unscheduled landing, passengers waited in an old gymnasium for about six hours, until a replacement plane arrived and flew them back to Honolulu. Luckily, there were no injuries. This is the yet another recent example of a issue involving a Boeing 777, the same type of aircraft involved in Malaysia 370, which disappeared over the Indian Ocean several months ago, and Asiana 214, which crashed on July 6, 2013 in San Francisco.